11:38 Dec 6th, 2009 | Notes

I’ve avoided talking about the tussle between Verizon/Motorola and Apple for some time now. I’ve ignored the attacks, claiming that the former are just trying to slap and scratch their way into a market which has already chosen its king. I’ve remained cool, calm and collected. But now, Verizon and Motorola have don’t something so incredibly stupid, arrogant and ill thought out that I can’t ignore it any longer.

Just look at his ad. Instantaneously it does unthinkable. Without even trying to remain level headed and sane it appears all guns blazing and destroys what could have been half of its customers. This deliberately ad removes women as potential buyers of the Motorola Droid and at the same time calls the most popular phone in the US a “tiara wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen”.

Good work.

Verizon and Motorola have come to this conclusion: their phone is butt ugly, and there is no way in the world that it appeals to women, or anyone for that matter, more than the iPhone. This is all true of course, the Droid is incredibly ugly. There is absolutely no way you can tout its design as “industrial” or “rugged” without bursting out in uninhibited laughter. It’s ugly.  So instead of highlighting the features of the Droid that women may like, such as the free turn-by-turn navigation, they decide that they don’t want women as customers at all.

They are then left with a miniscule marketing demographic, now that they have decided that they don’t want women or men with taste using their phone. Verizon and Motorola have shrunk their target market down to the lonely, unshaven, jeans and sneakers wearing, unloved, sweaty male college graduates who have never been touched and who work at Blockbuster on a Saturday night. And when they shrunk their market, they forgot that these buck teethed, greasy haired, barely post-pubescent men have no money to spend on a phone that talks like a robot every time you get a phone call.

Verizon and Motorola can’t face the fact that their product is not going to win. This isn’t the act of a company who is confident of success. And no, neither is this an act of a company who is being gutsy and sticking it to Apple and showing just how confident they are. Because smart companies don’t shrink their target demographic. This is the act of a company floundering to find a place for their product in a market which is beyond saturated with smart phones. So instead of customers choosing a place for the Droid, Verizon and Motorola are choosing one themselves. Because they are stupid.